A model of the Gordon Strong Automobile Objective and Planetarium, which was never built.

The extraordinary scope of his genius, which touched on every aspect of
American life, makes him one of the most daunting figures of the 20th
century. But to many he is still the vain, megalomaniacal architect,
someone who trampled over his clients’ wishes, drained their bank
accounts and left them with leaky roofs.
So “Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward,” which opens on Friday at the Guggenheim Museum,
will be a disappointment to some. The show offers no new insight into
his life’s work. Nor is there any real sense of what makes him so
controversial. It’s a chaste show, as if the Guggenheim, which is
celebrating its 50th anniversary, was determined to make Wright fit for
civilized company.
The advantage of this low-key approach is that
it puts the emphasis back where it belongs: on the work. There are more
than 200 drawings, many never exhibited publicly before. More than a
dozen scale models, some commissioned for the show, give a strong sense
of the lucidity of his designs and the intimate relationship between
building and landscape that was such a central theme of his art.
Taken
as a whole, the exhibition conveys not only the remarkable scope of his
interests, which ranged from affordable housing to reimagining the
American city, but also the astonishing cohesiveness of that vision
— an achievement that has been matched by only one or two other architects in the 20th century.
One way to experience the show is as a straightforward tour of Wright’s masterpieces. Organized by Thomas Krens
and David van der Leer, it is arranged in roughly chronological order,
so that you can spiral up through the highlights of his career: the
reinvention of the suburban home and the office block, the obsession
with car culture, the increasingly outlandish urban projects.
There
is a stunning plaster model of the vaultlike interior of Unity Temple,
built in Oak Park between 1905 and 1908. Just a bit farther up the ramp,
another model painstakingly recreates the Great Workroom of the Johnson
Wax Headquarters in Racine, Wis., with its delicate grid of mushroom
columns and milky glass ceiling.
Such tightly composed,
inward-looking structures contrast with the free-flowing spaces that we
tend to associate with Wright’s fantasy of a democratic, agrarian
society.
But as always with Wright, the complexity of his approach
reveals itself only after you begin to fit the pieces together. For
Wright, the singular masterpiece was never enough. His aim was to create
a framework for an entire new way of life, one that completely
redefined the relationships between individual, family and community.
And he pursued it with missionary zeal.
Wright went to extreme lengths to sell his dream of affordable housing for the masses, tirelessly promoting it in magazines.
The
second-floor annex shows a small sampling of its various incarnations,
including an elaborate model of the Jacobs House (1936-37), its walls
and floors pulled apart and suspended from the ceiling on a system of
wires and lead weights. One of Wright’s earliest Usonian houses, the
one-story Jacobs structure in Madison, Wis., was made of modest wood and
brick and organized around a central hearth. Its L-shape layout framed a
rectangular lawn, locking it into the landscape, so that the homeowner
remained in close touch with the earth.
The ideas Wright explored
in such projects were eventually woven into grander urban fantasies,
first proposed in Broadacre City and later in The Living City project.
In both, Usonian communities were dispersed over an endless matrix of
highways and farmland, punctuated by the occasional residential tower.
The
subtext of these plans, of course, was Wright’s war with the city. To
Wright, the congested neighborhoods of the traditional city were
anathema to the spirit of unbridled individual freedom. His alternative,
shaped by the car, represented a landscape of endless horizons. Sadly,
it was also a model for suburban sprawl.
Wright continued to
explore these themes until the end of his life, even as his formal
language evolved. A model of the Gordon Strong Automobile Objective and
Planetarium captures his growing obsession with the ziggurat and the
spiral. A tourist destination that was planned for Sugarloaf Mountain,
Md., but never built, the massive concrete structure coiled around a
vast planetarium. The project combines his love of cars and his
fascination with primitive forms, as if he were striving to weave
together the whole continuum of human history.
In his 1957 Plan
for Greater Baghdad, Wright went a step further, adapting his ideas to
the heart of the ancient city. The plan is centered on a spectacular
opera house enclosed beneath a spiraling dome and crowned by a statue of
Alladin. Set on an island in the Tigris, the opera house was to be
surrounded by tiers of parking and public gardens. A network of roadways
extends like tendrils from this base, weaving along the edge of the
river and tying the complex to the old city.
Just across the river, another ring of parking, almost a mile in diameter, encloses a new campus for Baghdad University.
Wright’s
fanciful design was never built, but it demonstrates the degree to
which he remained distrustful of urban centers. Stubborn to the end, he
saw the car as the city’s salvation rather than its ruin. The
cosmopolitan ideal is supplanted by a sprawling suburbia shaded by palms
and date trees.
And what of the Guggenheim? Some will continue to
see it as an example of Wright’s brazen indifference to the city’s
history. With its aloof attitude toward the Manhattan street grid, the
building still pushes buttons.
For his part, Wright saw the spiral
as a symbol of life and rebirth. The reflecting pool at the bottom of
his rotunda represented a seed, part of his vision of an organic
architecture that sprouts directly from the earth.
Yet Wright also
needed the city to make his vision work. The force of the spiral’s
upward thrust gains immeasurably from the grid that presses in on all
sides. The ramps, too, can be read as an extension of the street life
outside. Coiled tightly around the audience, they replicate the
atmosphere of urban intensity that Wright supposedly so abhorred.
Or
maybe not. In preparing for the show, the Guggenheim’s curators decided
to remove the frosting from a window at the lobby’s southwest corner.
The window frames a vista over a low retaining wall toward the corner of
88th Street and Fifth Avenue, where you can see people milling around
the exterior of the building. It is the only real view out of the lobby,
and it visually locks the building into the streetscape, making the
city part of the composition.
I choose to see it as a gesture of love, of a sort, between Wright and the city he claimed to hate.